It seems everyone is debating what it means to grow up, how long it takes and why it seems to be taking longer today than before. For those in youth ministry, these issues are more than academic, as our three experts prove.
A 30-year youth ministry veteran, Chap Clark is vice provost for regional campuses and strategic projects and professor of youth, family and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. He’s also author of the groundbreaking Hurt, which offers a vivid look inside the world of today’s teens. Don’t forget, he’s senior editor of YouthWorker Journal.
Jeffrey Arnett is the man who coined the term emerging adult. He’s also a research professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University and author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties.
With a wealth of experience that includes being a youth pastor, a camp pastor and a college campus pastor, Kelly Lashly is no stranger to the adolescent world. Today, she’s an assistant professor of family and youth ministries at Sioux Falls Seminary.
YouthWorker Journal: Childhood, adolescence, extended adolescence and emerging adulthood are all used to describe what it means to grow up. How would you define each of these terms?
Chap Clark: Childhood is the time in which we are dependent on family systems for our identity. At the age of puberty, all boys and girls move into adolescence and the process of discovering their own uniqueness. Until a child hits 14 or 15, the brain is in a relatively concrete mode. Around 14 or 15, the brain begins to shift into the adult ability of abstract thinking. Today this takes about 10 years. Thirty years ago, it took about five years. In ancient cultures, it took almost no time. In time, the brain adapts to the social environment. Now the brain takes longer because of the lack of adult involvement in helping young people navigate into adulthood. Today’s 23-year-old is the developmental equivalent of a 17-year-old 25 years ago.
Jeffrey Arnett: Adolescence starts with the outward signs of puberty. When it ends depends on cultural and historical elements. We’re used to thinking about age 18 as a major threshold. For most people in developed countries, that’s legal adulthood. It’s also when people finish secondary school and leave home for the first time. Puberty is over by 17 or 18. That means adolescence is done. It’s a clear ending of one stage and beginning of another—emerging adulthood. The lives of emerging adults are entirely different from those of 13-year-olds. They’re not minors under the law, living with their parents or in secondary school. They’re more independent. They’re finding jobs. Emerging adulthood is focused on preparation. It’s very unstable.
Kelly Lashly: Developmental psychologist John Santrock defines adolescence as beginning in biology with the onset of puberty and ending in culture. There is no one marker that indicates a young person has become an adult, which makes the conclusion of adolescence ambiguous. With loosely defined boundaries for the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood, a case can be made for the extension of adolescence in our culture.
YWJ: Is emerging adulthood a creation of culture?
Jeffrey: Emerging adulthood is a cultural and historical phenomenon. Only 18 percent of the world’s population experiences this; 82 percent of people are in developing countries. In India and China, it’s happening in the universities and in the urban middle class. That’s a small minority of people in those places. Emerging adulthood is going to grow in the 21st century as developing countries become developed.
YWJ: How are extended adolescence and emerging adulthood impacting society?
Chap: This delay in landing as an adult where you’re interdependent, trustworthy and have peers makes it difficult in business and church relationships to sacrifice one’s own desires and needs for the good of the whole. Rampant individualism and self-interest destroy the fabric of what it means to be in connection with one another. The perpetuation of adolescence into the mid- to late-20s and the lack of Christian adults to provide social capital to the young has caused mid-adolescents to lose a sense of loyalty to the kingdom of God.
Jeffrey: Young people rely on their parents longer. Fifty years ago, as a young woman, you got married at the age of 20 and moved out of the household. Then you were dependent on your husband. Now that marriage takes place so much later, many rely on their parents for financial support, advice and companionship.
Kelly: Extended adolescence and emerging adulthood are impacting society at many levels. We lack understanding of the developmental issues facing people at this age. Take churches. Typically, the church ministers to children, youth and adults. Where do recent high school graduates fit in the church body? Do they stay in youth group? Do we immerse them in the college or singles groups made up of 25- to 32-year-old people? How about the adult Sunday School classes? Or do we just let them find their own way? The church and youth ministry must work together to prevent the youth ministry from becoming an entity unto its own. When a youth ministry is an integral part of the larger faith community, there is great potential for young people to gain a strong sense of belonging among peers, caring adults and children younger than themselves.
YWJ: What are the marks of adulthood?
Jeffrey: About 20 years ago, I started asking people if they felt adult. They almost never mentioned the traditional markers of adulthood. Instead, they talked about accepting responsibility for themselves, making independent decisions and becoming financially independent. These are gradual and individualistic as opposed to a traditional transition such as marriage, which involves pledging yourself to a complex array of obligations.
Chap: Responsibility is an external outcome that may or may not point to adulthood. There are a lot of adolescents who are married, buy houses and are still irresponsible. The mark of adulthood is the internal journey of landing on a sense of self that’s interdependent on living together as peers.
YWJ: If those are the marks of adulthood, then what are the primary questions teens must answer in order to reach adulthood effectively?
Jeffrey: The core of it is identity. What am I good at? What do I enjoy? What is possible for me? It has to be all three of these questions. You might be good and enjoy it, but unable to make a living at it.
Chap: Identity verses formation: The prevailing viewpoint of developmental thinking is that we form into identities by the choices we make. We need to hold fast with the theology of the human person. Our uniqueness comes out of who God has created, redeemed and called us to be. Help kids know every person is gifted because calling and creation claims them to be. It’s the gospel.
YWJ: What are rites of passage, and why are they important? Which can youth ministries utilize to support and celebrate the journey from adolescence to adulthood?
Chap: They are the most misinterpreted concept in youth ministry. Arnold Van Gennep identified rites of passage around the world. He said rites of passages had to have a lifetime of preparation to new status marked by a celebration as a change of status that fully embraced the child in the new adult status. We cannot possibly do the first and third part in the way other cultures did. Instead, we have empty celebrations on superficial training. We never confer any significant change of status. When we don’t give social capital and true authentic training to move into adulthood, we’re kidding ourselves and damaging our kids.
Kelly: Rites of passage are significant events that aid in establishing life markers that help families and communities acknowledge growth or maturity in a person’s life. We can be creative in instituting meaningful rites of passage in adolescence from entering middle school or high school, to baptism, to getting a drivers license, to graduation, to demonstrating a sense of responsibility for their lives or for others, to getting a first job. There are some natural adolescent transitions that exist in our culture, such as progression through school, that we need to think more deeply about and acknowledge in meaningful ways in order to help young people establish healthy and stable identities to move toward adulthood.
YWJ: How can youth workers help teens progress toward spiritual and other types of maturity?
Chap: We have to be careful not to make ourselves the center of the process. That’s the problem with youth ministry during the past 40 years. We think that by being a small group leader for a couple of years that we’ve made a lifelong difference in kids’ lives. With very few we have. Mostly, we’ve created spiritual orphans who are left to fend for themselves. It takes a long time to undo the systemic effects of long-term abandonment. Youth leaders can do a great job if they see themselves as partners of a process and not the fixers of kids. Our job is to equip the body of Christ to reinvest in the lives of our kids. All we do becomes an expression of the body of Christ surrounding kids with the expression and encouragement of the body of faith.
Kelly: We are not just dealing with spiritual beings. We are dealing with whole persons, adolescents who are developing and changing physically, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. As we plan for youth ministry, an important question to ask is: Are we taking into account the whole person and all the developmental dynamics of a maturing person and disciple of Christ?
YWJ: What else do we need to know?
Jeffrey: We tend to view emerging adults as not willing to grow up, not having a good work ethic and not caring about others. Look around at what young people are doing. This is the generation that has achieved an education. Rates of volunteering and getting involved in social movements are higher for emerging adults than other groups. We often don’t give them enough credit for what’s good about them.
Chap: Whatever labels we put on kids, we must take seriously the fact that adolescence has changed. It is more difficult to become an adult for everyone. Every child and adolescent needs to have significant non-parental adults who are deeply committed to them for the long haul.
Recommended Resources
Hurt 2.0
Sticky Faith
Disconnected
Jefferey Arnett’s articles and books on emerging adulthood
Diane Garland, Family Ministry
Immerse Journal published by Barefoot Ministries
Lifelong Faith Journal published by Lifelong Faith Associates
